History

Uhhhhh history, the chain of events that follow one after another in a perfectly logical way over time, according to a cause and effect relationship that anyone can see. But what if it isn’t that simple?

We are the history

Every second we breathe is a historical moment, each of us technically is part of the history. An ephemeral history, soon to be forgotten in the second immediately following. So many small human beings who together unknowingly make up the world.

History is often seen as something distant, an abstract concept written by events that follow a logic, but the reality is that those who have gone down in history have behaved simply as human beings, and being remembered by future generations is only the consequence of their actions.

You who are reading this article are part of history, but you aren't aware of it. About an ordinary person, in fact, there is hardly anything left for future generations to study. Think about this: are there stories in the history books about how some random guy grew wheat or the heroic achievements of Julius Caesar? From that era, we are left with only the stories of nobles and wealthy Romans who had some influence (also because the farmers were illiterate).

Since no one is going to judge us in the future, why shouldn’t we live as we prefer? (Within the limits of the law)

History Today

Two months ago a historic event happened, the former president Donald Trump almost died from the bullet fired by a boy lying on a rooftop. An event that will probably be written in the history books, but where were the rest of us while it was happening? We were watching TV, working, using social media, in short, nothing different from what we were doing every other day. Personally, as soon as I read the news I didn’t care so much, I had taken it as normal news, also because in the end he survived.

However, this made me think about our perception of history. Until then, I thought that the assassination attempt made on John F. Kennedy in 1963 was perceived as a shocking event for people at the time, because that was how the history books had explained to me, however most likely the reaction of the ordinary person was similar to what I had today, a certain indifference after a few days.

Kennedy in the past was the equivalent of Trump today, very wealthy family, Republican politician and hated like Trump today by about half the population who preferred the Democrats. If he hadn’t died brutally, he would be just like any other president today, but the assassination attempt made him recognizable 60 years later, building around him a benevolent aura, almost sanctifying him as a martyr, hiding all the hate he represented while he was alive.

Now that Trump will also be remembered, will future generations think of him as we do about JFK today?

Ignorance

The reconstruction of past populations has been done mainly from archaeological finds that have remained intact, and this is for reasonable reasons. That is: those who lived in the past are all dead :)

We know a lot about the Romans, thanks to the large amount of objects and texts found, so much so that to this day in Italian schools the Latin language of the Roman aristocracy is still taught (spoiler: it’s useless, since throughout the Roman empire each region used its own dialect).

If we look back to the Paleolithic period, all we have are stone arrowheads used for hunting animals, and maybe some graffiti, but we could never imagine the world as a nomadic person of that time. What we have found is what has stood the test of time, a bit like survivorship bias. If an ancient people handed down their knowledge exclusively orally, all that information is now lost forever.

Even if we find a new archaeological find, we can't immediately take it as reliable. Roman senators did their best to discredit the Roman emperor Nero, and today many people believe he was insane. However, later, historians realized that they did so only because the emperor wanted to reduce their power and concentrate it in his hands, and that indeed he was a wise emperor.

Nowadays, all the knowledge we produce has taken on a new dimension online, in the last 20 years we have increasingly abandoned the physical world, and now we are inside a decentralized territory where at any moment a website could disappear forever.

However, this also allowed the human content to scale up to insane levels: no one could read all the posts written on social media, and this leads us to overload. There is so much information that it’s not trivial to identify the ones that really matter, and a future historian should try to use some kind of scientific method to separate out the noise (such as fake news).

Winner’s History

Those who have enough influence to leave artifacts for future generations have the ability to influence the perceived history of that particular era. History, in fact, always has its own point of view, and it’s generally the one of the strongest people, since that is the one that leaves us with most ancient literature texts, making us understand their culture, as in the case of the Romans. Today we see the Roman empire as one of the most important of the past, we study the heroic deeds of its emperors, and we are impressed by them, but perhaps we wouldn’t give it such importance if there had been a stronger empire at the same time.

If Romans had besieged an enemy people and destroyed everything they could find, we wouldn’t know today absolutely anything, if no evidence remains, because we only look at what is left. Did such an event therefore happen? Maybe yes, maybe no, we can’t know, but neither can exclude it.

Moreover, also the present world influences the way we see history. Thanks to the victory of the Americans in World War II, we now enjoy democracies in the West where freedom is an important characteristic. If we were in some form of dictatorship, however, perhaps we would look at past forms of government with different eyes, hating the democracy of the Greeks instead of recognizing it as an advanced form for the time.

If the Nazis had won, the winner’s history written in the books would be theirs, and we would look at Americans as the villains in WW2, it would be a profoundly different world.

Remembered in History

Unless we are the new Julius Caesar, then, how could we be sure that we will be remembered by anyone other than our own family? By the way, a topic we have discussed before in other blog posts.

In ancient Greece, a certain Herostatus thought that a good solution would be to burn down one of the most famous temples, which was considered a wonder of the ancient world. Comparing it to the present day, it is as if someone had destroyed the Statue of Liberty or the Colosseum, let’s imagine that such an event would be even worse than 9/11.

As a punishment, the people of the time killed him and established by law that his name would never be written anywhere, to make his desire vain. However, obviously, if we know his name, his plan worked!

However, destroying a wonder of the world is not an ethical way to act, and therefore it’s necessary to find an alternative, which, however, doesn’t exist. You have to be a really influential person, the kind you can count on the fingers of one hand, and even getting to that, after a thousand years you will still be forgotten. Historians in the year 5000 will find our phones buried in the ground, no longer working, and will ask themselves what they just found.

History does (not) repeat itself

Although we can carefully study everything that has taken place in the past, we will never be certain of what may happen in the immediate future.

In World War II, no one expected that a war of that size would break out anytime soon, everyone thought about striking as soon as possible to destroy the enemy defenses, and they thought that in a few months there would be a great victory. After all, that’s what happened exactly a few months ago with Ukraine, and yet we still don’t know whether there will be a WW3 or whether it will all end soon, despite the fact that we are experiencing it right now.

Rearranging facts and creating a cause-and-effect relationship is done only when things have already happened, and looking at the past it’s easy to say that there is always a logical connection. However, what people really thought just before the start of World War II is pretty much what we think today, which is that we don't know how things will evolve. Now some people are protesting about sending guns to Ukraine, just like in the days of Hitler, a small part of US citizens were protesting about sending aid to the UK claiming that the war in Europe wasn't their business.

Future is unknown

Now, as in the past, knowing the future is impossible, and the only thing we can do is prepare for the worst, as Taleb explains in his book “The Black Swan”.